He Gave Me Fake Bags and a Fake Future Chapter 01
After Adrian and I fell into our fiftieth standoff, I was angry enough to list every luxury gift he’d given me over the years on a resale site.
The authenticator who came by to inspect them looked everything over for a long moment, then let out a laugh.
“Ma’am, this says Balenciago, not Balenciaga. Versaci, not Versace. And this one? Guchi, not Gucci…”
I stared at the laughably bad misspellings. For eight years, I’d trusted Adrian so completely that I’d never once bothered to look closely.
He gave me a sympathetic look.
“These don’t even qualify as decent counterfeits. Ten boxes? Fifty bucks, tops.”
I closed my fist around the crumpled bills and went straight to Adrian.
He was in a private dining room, casually opening a bottle of wine.
“Romanée-Conti. Seven hundred grand. A little something to celebrate your promotion.”
Sloane Parker laughed softly behind her hand. “Adrian, that’s way too much.”
“You’re worth it.”
One of his friends spotted me and deliberately spoke up.
“Seriously, Adrian. It’s been eight years. You’ve never thought about marrying Claire?”
Adrian swirled the wine in his glass and smiled.
“Marry her? She can’t even tell a fake from the real thing, and you think I’d make her Mrs. Sterling?”
“It was just for fun. She actually took it seriously?”
Eight years of trust and waiting crumbled under those four words: just for fun.
In that instant, I finally understood. He had never loved me.
…
Someone in the room let out a whistle.
“Well, look who finally showed up. Claire.”
Adrian barely glanced up, his voice flat.
“Back already? I thought you’d last longer.”
“What was it this time, forty-eight hours? New record, Claire.”
Someone laughed. “Look at her face, Adrian. She obviously missed you like crazy.”
“Exactly. They fight, she storms off, and somehow she’s still the one who comes crawling back.”
I dug my nails into my palm, stepped forward, and slapped the fifty dollars onto the table.
“Eight years of gifts. Fifty dollars total.”
“I had no idea the great Adrian Sterling had fallen on such hard times.”
Sloane smiled sweetly.
“Claire, you’re selling his gifts? Adrian just opened a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar bottle for me. If you needed cash, all you had to do was ask your boyfriend.”
Adrian glanced at the bills, one corner of his mouth curling.
“That’s cute, Claire.”
“Selling off my gifts because we had a fight? What, are you actually trying to be done with me this time?”
Several of his friends burst out laughing.
“Claire, we knew those bags were fake years ago. Every time you carried one, we had to stare at our phones so we wouldn’t laugh in your face.”
“Eight years. We even had a pool going on when you’d figure it out. Some said three months, some a year, one guy gave you three. Then you made it eight and nobody won.”
Sloane reached over and gave my sleeve a light tug.
“Come on, Claire. Don’t be mad. Sit down and have some wine.”
She smiled as she added,
“Although with all your designer stuff being fake, I guess Romanée-Conti would be a little off-brand for you.”
The room erupted in laughter.
Adrian took a slow drag from his cigarette without saying a word.
I finally got my breathing under control and met his eyes.
“Adrian, did you give me counterfeits because you didn’t know better, or because you thought I wasn’t worth the real thing?”
Impatience flickered across his face as he ground his cigarette into the ashtray.
“I open a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar bottle without blinking. You really think I can’t afford the real thing?”
A laugh almost escaped me. The whole thing was so absurd I could taste the bitterness in my throat.
